Newspaper personal ads are meant to attract companionship, of one kind or another. In the case of “The Few,” they made a match between a writer and a play.

In 2006, Samuel D. Hunter was a grad student in Iowa City, Iowa, which sits along a major interstate, when he became intrigued by the phenomenon of publications that had names like “Country Singles” and catered to long-haul truckers.

“I had this weird experience reading (their personals), because at first they were kind of funny,” says Hunter, the rising, Idaho-born playwright whose latest work is an Old Globe Theatre world premiere.

“And then as you keep reading them they become fascinating. And then (eventually) they become really, really heartbreaking. Because y

Playwright Samuel D. Hunter. — Jim Cox

ou realize these are people who have no community.

“They’re kind of the backbone of our country and constantly on the move, and here are these personal ads that are like flares they’re sending up in the night. Like, ‘Is there anybody out there?’”

Those notions coalesced into “The Few,” which shares a name with the fictional newspaper at its center. The intimately scaled play focuses on the paper’s long-absent founder, Bryan (Michael Laurence), who originally created it as an outgrowth of a makeshift community for truckers.

On its pages could be found accounts of driving a tanker in the middle of a hurricane, or of taking photos of McDonald’s restaurants in 40 different states. (Hunter notes that the play calls Bryan’s vision of the paper “a way to reassure these guys that they still exist.”)

But now Bryan has returned to find that his former lover, QZ (Eva Kaminsky, a standout in the Globe’s “Good People” last year), has turned the publication into more of a moneymaking ploy, relying mostly on personals.

The play has only three characters who actually appear onstage (Gideon Glick portrays Matthew). But the Globe production has an additional, novel twist: Hunter and director Davis McCallum (who also directed the Globe’s 2008 world premiere of Itamar Moses’ “Back Back Back”) have cast 17 San Diego-area residents in voice roles.

The idea is that these nonprofessional actors will be heard as the people who place and respond to the personals. (The final roster won’t be known until the production’s opening night.) They were selected via public auditions that began in July.

Hunter says he and McCallum knew early on that they wanted to include “real” voices in the show. But they discovered that when they tried using true amateurs with little or no interest in acting, those people tended to try too hard and wound up coming off as artificial.

“It kind of takes someone who has some chops and interest and knows how to read a line,” as Hunter puts it. “(The question was), how do we get people who are both really authentic and also have an interest in acting?

“And I thought the Old Globe’s solution (to send out a public call) was so perfect, because the play is so much about isolation and finding community.”

The creative team wound up with a collection of nearly 130 voices that was “such an embarrassment of riches,” Hunter adds. “They were all so smart and idiosyncratic, and funny and heartfelt. So that part was really fun. It became about finding the right instruments to create the symphony.”

Speaking of which: Hunter’s profile has risen substantially in the past year or so thanks to the success of “The Whale,” his play about the difficult struggles faced by a morbidly obese man and his family and friends. That work had a well-received off-Broadway staging last fall, and earned Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel awards as best play. (His 2011 play “A Bright New Boise” also won an Obie Award.)

Comparing the tone and scope of “The Whale” to that of “The Few,” Hunter says that if the former “is like a symphony, this is more like a sonata. It’s more delicate” — smaller not in ideas but in form and execution. (Both, he notes, have their comedic elements.)

That small scale, he adds, makes “The Few” the ideal choice as his first play to do in the round (the Globe production goes up in the arena-style White Theatre).

“The play is about this delicate little room with three people in it, struggling to connect with each other in a meaningful way,” he says. “What better way to experience that play than in a big circle with everyone else, so that we’re all in this together?”